Escape
by Zetor
Summary: Daria's family eats the berries her father forages for breakfast and things get very strange very fast.


**Disclaimer: Some text taken from Season 1 Episode 12 "The Teachings of Don Jake" by Glenn Eichler without permission. I don't own it or any other part of Daria.**

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Daria watched helplessly as her father ran down a marked off trail, ducking under a warning sign and disappearing around a bend. Her day just kept getting better. It was bad enough she was stuck in the woods with her family, now she had to babysit her father as he regressed into his childhood. With a sigh, she trudged after him.

It didn't take long to catch up; she found him a short way down the trail, yelling at a tree about his father. Daria started toward him to try and calm him down, but stopped when she saw a strange sparkling around the tree in front of him. At first she thought it was a trick of the light, but then the tree began to change. She watched in horrified fascination as the head of a man twisted out of the tree, wood warping into flesh and blood. Jake grasped its neck and started choking. At first Daria thought he was trying to defend himself, but then she noticed he hadn't ceased his rant, spittle flying into what Daria now recognized as her dead grandfather's face.

Before she could figure out what was happening, she heard Quinn scream back on the main trail. Her father let go of the abomination's neck and darted into the woods toward the noise. Daria hurried after him, having no desire to be left behind with whatever that thing was.

When she and Jake finally made it through the brush, Daria found Quinn crouching over their unconscious mother. The clearing they were in looked like something out of _Alice in Wonderland_ , doors on trees and strange bright colored plants growing everywhere. Quinn rose and ran to Daria. "Daria! Mom started talking about buds and tribes and doors, and then there was this weird glitter everywhere and everything she said started happening!"

While Daria tried to figure out what was happening and reconcile it with reality, Jake knelt down and shook his wife. She quickly roused and asked, "Jake, what's going on?"

"Quinn said you fell unconscious and were talking about tribes or something," Daria explained, trying to focus on the part of the crisis that didn't defy her understanding of reality.

Helen laughed, her clearly dilated eyes gleaming unnaturally. "No, honey, the tide! I was saying we ought to set sail while the tide's still high." As the words came out of her mouth, the floor of the forest started to shimmer. A low rolling wave of water washed across them leaving about four inches of seawater covering the forest as far as Daria could see.

Quinn looked around, panic on her face. "Daria? Dad? I'm scared. What's going on?"

Jake laughed heartily, his eyes now the same as Hellen's. "Don't worry, sweetie. Your Mom sounds a little nutty but she's making perfect sense."

"I think she was talking about the sudden rise in the sea level," Daria said flatly.

Jake seemed not to hear her and continued, "If we try to sail at low tide and ran aground, we'd be sitting ducks for Captain Cutlass' men." He laughed again as there was another shimmer and several dark forms appeared in the woods around them. "I don't know about you, but I don't want to be skinned alive and thrown to the sharks, right girls? Come on, let's go gather some provisions!" With another laugh, he pulled Hellen to her feet and the two ran off into the woods.

"This is really scary, Daria," Quinn said, her sneakers making a squishing sound as she moved closer to her older sister.

"Stay calm Quinn, we've got to figure out why this is happening," Daria said, struggling to hold it together herself. "There's got to be some logical reason for all this. It's like something is making everything Mom and Dad say become real."

"Why not us though?" Quinn asked.

"I don't know," Daria admitted. "It could be anything. We're dealing with something that doesn't play by the rules of conventional reality. For all I know it was those damn berries Dad served for breakfast." Suddenly, the dark figures in the woods started to advance towards them.

"It couldn't have been the berries," Quinn said as Daria dragged her away from whatever was coming after them.

"Why not? These guys seem interested in the idea." Daria's boot caught a root and she fell face first into the muddy surf, almost knocking her glasses off and cracking one of the lenses. When she flipped herself over, she saw Quinn looking down at her with a manic smile, her eyes the same as their parents'.

"Because, those weren't the glitter berries," Quinn said in a dream like voice.

"Glitter berries?" Daria asked reflexively. Their pursuers were growing closer, just on the other side of the clearing now. As she'd guessed, they were the pirates from her parents' fantasy; large dangerous men wielding swords and clubs.

Oblivious to the approaching threat, Quinn answered, "You know, the glitter berries! The ones that fill your mouth with beautiful sparkling glitter when you bite into them." Daria watched in horror as the glitter from before poured out of Quinn's eyes and mouth and began to swirl around her. " _Those_ are the ones that make you act weird. I mean, until you spread your shimmering wings and fly away." The glitter completely engulfed her like some kind of shining cocoon. Moments later, she burst out, showering the forest in the sparkling substance.

Quinn looked like some kind of nightmarish fairy princess. Her upturned almond shaped eyes were solid black, except for the strange gleam that had been in her parents'. The rest of her face was undeniably beautiful, but it was a cruel alien beauty. Her body was the same, thin and perfect, but wrong. Too light and delicate for a human. She wore a delicate silver crown and an intricate flowing green dress, open backed to allow the pair of buzzing gossamer wings that now extended from her back to move freely.

She gave a vicious smirk, then rose up and spun in the air, turning to face their attackers. From out of thin air she pulled an intricately crafted rapier, shimmering like all the dream creations did. She let out a battle cry and charged, a hundred tiny fairies joining her from where the pieces of her cocoon had fallen.

For a moment Daria watched, transfixed as the fey army and Captain Cutlass's crew did battle. Tiny soldiers were cut in half while their comrades stabbed out the eyes of angry buccaneers. Shortly, however, she realized that even if Quinn's side did win, it didn't guarantee her safety. She quickly got to her feet and ran deeper into the woods.

Daria put as much distance between herself and the battle as she could, but soon had to stop to catch her breath. Coming to another clearing, she sat down on a fallen log to rest her legs. Almost as soon as she did, there was a gentle rustle from the brush at the other end of the clearing and what could only be another of her family's fever dreams emerged.

The beast looked like a very large antelope, the top of its back taller than Daria was standing up. It had a bright yellow coat with broad orange stripes across its back and three long spiraling horns jutting from its head. Perhaps most disturbing, it had a human face, one that bore a distinct resemblance to Pat Morita.

Walking cautiously forward, the beast appraised Daria. "You look like you could use some advice," it said, its voice that of a kind grandfather.

Daria weighed her options. Her first instinct was to run, being near anything that came out of her family's head seemed like a bad idea. She had to figure out how to stop this though, or at least get out of here, and this thing might have a clue. "I don't suppose you know why my family's gone crazy? Or why the world seems to have decided to go along with it?"

"Unfortunately, I cannot answer questions, only offer advice on a course of action. Your father was quite upset about this," the beast said with a touch of sadness in its voice.

"Then how about you _advise_ me on how to get things back to normal?"

The beast laughed, it was a warm pleasant sound. "Normal is such a confusing term. What is normal to one is strange to another. What you see before you is normal, _now_."

Daria ground her teeth, starting to see why this thing made her father angry. With a frustrated sigh, she tried again, "Okay, how's this? I want make my family unable to manifest their thoughts into reality and remove those manifestations. Advise me."

The beast smiled. "I knew you were a smart one. To undo what has been done and make it undoable you must go back to the beginning."

Before Daria could ask what the heck that meant, the beast looked over its shoulder and bolted into the wood. Moments later, Hellen, Jake, and a small tribe of what looked like some B movie's idea of a tribe aboriginals burst into the clearing. Jake, wearing similar attire to the tribe, was waving a stick and shouting, "Spirit animal! Come back, spirit animal!"

Hellen was still clothed for the pirate fantasy, looking like she belonged on the cover of a bad romance novel, but seemed to be in line with Jake's current delusion. Walking up to Daria, she asked, "Daria, have you seen your father's spirit animal? He was just telling it about his childhood when it jumped up and scampered off."

Daria decided that getting them away from her was the best course of action until she could figure out what to do. "Big yellow thing that looks like Mr. Miyagi? Kind of a jerk?"

"Yeah!" cried Jake.

"He went that way," Daria said, pointing the direction the beast had run.

"Thanks sweetie," Hellen said, patting Daria on the arm before running off with the rest of the group.

Once they were gone, Daria stood up and tried to get her bearings. "Back to the beginning," she repeated aloud. That had to mean the campsite. She felt crazy working off of the cryptic advice of one of her father's delusions, but she didn't exactly have anything else to go off of. Maybe since he imagined it as a spirit guide it would actually work as one.

It was late afternoon by the time Daria reached the campsite. She'd had a hard time finding her way back, and avoiding her family's delusions had slowed her down even further; almost being trampled by a pack of zebras was not a problem she had ever anticipated having. The site was drenched in almost half a foot of sea water like everything else in the forest, and she started the long process of digging through her family's wet bags.

Daria sighed in defeat, silently cursing her father's spirit beast. Nothing she found could possibly be useful against the monsters now roaming the forest, much less cure her family. Her stomach rumbled, reminding her that she hadn't had anything to eat since dinner the night before, having not trusted the berries her father had gathered for breakfast. Then something clicked. The berries. Quinn had talked about them, and the pirates had started advancing when she mentioned them. It was crazy, but so was everything else happening today. Frantically, she searched through the camp and found the branch her father brought back that morning, several berries still attached.

Just as she was about to eat the handful of berries, something else occurred to Daria. Her family hadn't just gained the ability to bend reality, they'd also all gone mad. Lowering the handful of fruit, she again weighed her options. Staying here and waiting for one of her family's dreams to kill her wasn't very appealing. Going mad and living out a fantasy was a bit better, but, given some of her dreams, it was also less than ideal. The beast had said this was what she had to do to save her family and remove their ability to create things, so there had to be a way to eat the berries and stay sane. Not just that, but also gain a greater power, enough to remove what her family had gained.

Lacking any further clues and knowing that every minute that passed she was more likely to run into some creature she couldn't avoid or out talk, Daria decided that relying on what knowledge of the berries she had and her willpower was her only option. Taking a deep breath, she closed her eyes and tried to clear her mind. Over and over she thought of what she wanted. Sanity. Omnipotence. Sanity. Omnipotence.

When Daria bit down into the berries she felt their juice flow into her mouth, then spread into her whole being. It was amazing. Immediately she knew she could do anything; she could feel the world calling to her and asking her to shape it. She almost didn't notice the pinprick in the back of her mind, like something trying to get in. It made a little progress, but she pinned it down. It was only in a little, nothing to worry about for the moment. She had to find her family.

Quinn was the first and the most difficult, not to say she was a challenge. Daria found her in a clearing, being attended to by idealized male servants. Daria willed them out of being with a thought. Quinn saw Daria and charged, drawing her rapier from thin air as she did. Daria merely stood still, a smile growing on her face as the phantom sword disintegrated when it came near her. Quinn held up what was left of her blade in shock, throwing it down and retreating upwards into the treetops. Daria followed, her smile widening, not needing anything as vulgar as wings to fly. She caught Quinn by the wings and put a hand to the back of her head, draining her of the berries power. Again there was that feeling in the back of her mind, but again she stopped it before it made too much progress. She held her sister's limp body as she reverted to her normal appearance, then flew her back to camp to rest.

Her parents were fun. She toyed with them a bit, chasing them around the woods with their own conjured companions and smiling all the way. Part of her wondered why she was doing it, but a growing part enjoyed it.

After her family were all resting at the campsite, Daria flew through the woods and unmade everything her family had created. Sometimes she would feel that little tickle in the back of her mind, but she always caught it. Sure it was getting bigger, but did that really matter? It couldn't matter that much. More important to have a little fun while she got rid of her family's creations, maybe make a few of her own to fight them.

Daria looked down at the campsite and her sleeping family with boredom. Everything was cleaned up, nothing left to play with. She knew she was supposed to return to them and go back to Lawndale, back to school, but she couldn't remember why. It seemed stupid, with all her power she could do anything. Why live a boring life like that? Then, she had an idea. Grinning, she flew down and made a new creation. A short auburn haired girl with a contrary attitude and an overdeveloped sense of justice. That done, she flew off in search of a playmate.

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Jane leaned back and tried to relax in her seat, headphones pounding the familiar sounds No Doubt's _Tragic Kingdom_ into her ears. One day was far too long to spend with her father's family; she still had a hard time believing she was related to them. Thankfully, she and Trent had been able to exchange their return tickets and leave early, it would have been a pain to explain to Aunt Bernice why they took off with her rental car.

"Jane," a voice called.

Jane dropped her headphones around her neck and turned to Trent, sitting on her right. He was sleeping, which usually wouldn't have been surprising, but she'd clearly heard her name. Shrugging and figuring he must have been talking in his sleep, Jane started to put her headphones back on.

"Wrong side, Jane," came the voice again, a hint of amusement in it this time.

Jane turned to her left and found what she thought was there, the window. Deciding to see where this apparent mental breakdown was taking her, she lifted the shade and looked out. Standing on the wing, long hair and clothing unaffected by the wind, was her best friend Daria. Putting aside the fact that she was standing on the wing of a plane, she looked a little off. She was covered in caked mud, the left lens of her glasses was cracked, and her hair was a windswept mess full of twigs. Most unsettling though, was her smile. A lot of people thought Daria didn't smile at all, but Jane had seen her a few times. Never like this though, this was a wild manic smile matched by a strange gleam in her eyes.

Daria reached her hand into her pocket and produced what looked like some wild berries. She held them out to Jane. "Have you ever wanted to be a God, Jane?"

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 **Yo!**

 **As with several of my other stories, this came from a certain challenge thread on the PPMB. I was supposed to write a story concerning the glitterberries from the episode having a real effect on Daria's family. I actually neglected several of the challenges requirements, but I think things turned out interesting and everyone seemed happy.**

 **I wrote the last piece to this first, having very little idea how I'd get there. It was a very interesting experience. The tone and style of this story also snuck up on me. So, all around very weird to write.**

 **Did this turn out well? Was it a failed experiment that should never be attempted by man again? Feel free to let me know. Thanks for reading.**


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